Galbraith, Harrington, Heilbroner: Economics and Dissent in an Age of Optimism
Author: Loren J. Okroi In a remarkably lucid and flowing style, Loren Okroi analyzes the ideas of three leading reformer-critics in the United States and places their main arguments in the context of the economic, social, and political history of postwar America. In so doing, he provides not only a skillful introduction to American social thought since the 1950s but also a wide-ranging examination of the contemporary failures of American liberal ideology. As he explicates the works of these three men--all of whom moved easily between the academic world and the arenas of politics, government, or journalism--it becomes clear that present policy debates have not even begun to resolve the dilemmas their writings have exposed.Millions of readers know J. K. Galbraith, the renowned Harvard economist and social theorist who developed the concept of the New Industrial State; Michael Harrington, the de facto leader of the American socialist movement who revealed the existence of the other America; and Robert Heilbroner, the incisive economic thinker who questioned the naive optimism of Americans even before it significantly eroded in the mid-1970s. In this book they emerge as individuals, as thinkers, and as part of a larger picture of American efforts to reconcile democratic values and humane social goals with modern corporate capitalism.The study begins with a portrait of the U.S. economy and society at the end of the Civil War and discusses the momentous changes brought about by the rapid industrialization that followed. The central portion revolves around Galbraith, Harrington, and Heilbroner and explores their contributions to the intellectual and political discourse on key issues confronting America in the decades after 1945: the evolutionary trajectory of managerial capitalism; the persistence of poverty and class divisions; the expansion of the welfare state and the public sector in general; and the assault on welfare capitalism by the New Right in the 1980s. The concluding chapter examines the causes and consequences of the fervent adherence of Americans to liberal ideology, the origins and philosophical bases of that set of beliefs, and its future prospects.Originally published in 1988.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Robert D. Stock
Focusing particularly on literary texts, but including biographical and intellectual background, this study examines numinous feeling as it is recorded by a number of seventeenth and eighteenth-century writers: Browne, Drydcn, Pascal; Pope and Swift; Hume and Johnson; eight other poets, including Watts, Smart, Cowper, and Blake; and four novelists, including Richardson, Radcliffe, and Monk Lewis. Professor Stock demonstrates that the Enlightenment was far more complicated than can be grasped by an exclusive focus on its rationalism and skepticism.Originally published in 1982.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Roberto Verganti
The standard text on innovation advises would-be innovators to conduct creative brainstorming sessions and seek input from outsidersusers or communities. This kind of innovating can be effective at improving products but not at capturing bigger opportunities in the marketplace. In this book Roberto Verganti offers a new approachone that does not set out to solve existing problems but to find breakthrough meaningful experiences. There is no brainstormingwhich produces too many ideas, unfilteredbut a vision, subject to criticism. It does not come from outsiders but from one persons unique interpretation. The alternate path to innovation mapped by Verganti aims to discover not how things work but why we need things. It gives customers something more meaningfulsomething they can love. Verganti describes the work of companies, including Nest Labs, Apple, Yankee Candle, and Philips Healthcare, that have created successful businesses by doing just this. Nest Labs, for example, didnt create a more advanced programmable thermostat, because people dont love to program their home appliances. Nests thermostat learns the habits of the household and bases its temperature settings accordingly. Verganti discusses principles and practices, methods and implementation. The process begins with a vision and proceeds through developmental criticism, first from a sparring partner and then from a circle of radical thinkers, then from external experts and interpreters, and only then from users. Innovation driven by meaning is the way to create value in our current world, where ideas are abundant but novel visions are rare. If something is meaningful for both the people who create it and the people who consume it, business value follows.
Author: Richard C. Francis
Much of the evolutionary biology that has grabbed headlines in recent years has sprung from the efforts of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists to explain sexual features and behavior--even differences between how men and women think--as evolutionary adaptations. They have looked to the forces of natural selection to explain everything from the mimicry of male mockingbirds to female orgasms among humans. In this controversial book, Richard Francis argues that the utility of this approach is greatly exaggerated. He proposes instead a powerful alternative rooted in the latest findings in evolutionary biology as well as research on the workings of our brains, genes, and hormones. Exploring various sexual phenomena, Francis exposes fundamental defects in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, which he traces to their misguided emphasis on why questions at the expense of how questions. Francis contends that this preoccupation with why questions (such as, Why won't men ask for directions?) results in a paranoiac mindset and distorted evolutionary explanations. His alternative framework entails a broader conception of what constitutes an evolutionary explanation, one in which both evolutionary history, as embodied in the tree of life, and developmental processes are brought to the foreground. This alternative framework is also better grounded in basic biology. Deeply learned, consistently persuasive, and always engaging, this book is a welcome antidote to simplistic sociobiological exegeses of animal and human behavior.
Author: James W. Cortada
Before the Computer fully explores the data processing industry in the United States from its nineteenth-century inception down to the period when the computer became its primary tool. As James Cortada describes what was once called the office appliance industry, he challenges our view of the digital computer as a revolutionary technology. Cortada interprets reliance on computers as a development within an important segment of the American economy that was earlier represented largely by such instruments as typewriters, tabulating machines, adding machines, and calculators. He also describes how many of the practices of the office appliance industry evolved into those of the computer world. Drawing on previously unavailable industry archives, the author adds to our understanding of IBM's early history and offers short corporate histories of firms that include NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand. Focusing on the United States but also including comparative material on Europe and Asia, Before the Computer will be a unique source of knowledge about the companies that built office equipment and their enormous impact on economic life.Originally published in 1993.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Rebecca K. Shrum
What did it mean, Rebecca K. Shrum asks, for peoplelong-accustomed to associating reflective surfaces with ritual and magicto became as familiar with how they looked as they were with the appearance of other people? Fragmentary histories tantalize us with how early Americanspeople of Native, European, and African descentinteracted with mirrors. Shrum argues that mirrors became objects through which white men asserted their claims to modernity, emphasizing mirrors as fulcrums of truth that enabled them to know and master themselves and their world. In claiming that mirrors revealed and substantiated their own enlightenment and rationality, white men sought to differentiate how they used mirrors from not only white women but also from Native Americans and African Americans, who had long claimed ownership of and the right to determine the meaning of mirrors for themselves. Mirrors thus played an important role in the construction of early American racial and gender hierarchies. Drawing from archival research, as well as archaeological studies, probate inventories, trade records, and visual sources, Shrum also assesses extant mirrors in museum collections through a material culture lens. Focusing on how mirrors were acquired in America and by whom, as well as the profound influence mirrors had, both individually and collectively, on the groups that embraced them, In the Looking Glass is a piece of innovative textual and visual scholarship.
Author: By Klaus P. Fischer
In February 1942, barely two months after he had declared war on the United States, Adolf Hitler praised America's great industrial achievements and admitted that Germany would need some time to catch up. The Americans, he said, had shown the way in developing the most efficient methods of productionespecially in iron and coal, which formed the basis of modern industrial civilization. He also touted America's superiority in the field of transportation, particularly the automobile. He loved automobiles and saw in Henry Ford a great hero of the industrial age. Hitler's personal train was even code-named Amerika.In Hitler and America, historian Klaus P. Fischer seeks to understand more deeply how Hitler viewed America, the nation that was central to Germany's defeat. He reveals Hitler's split-minded image of America: America and Amerika. Hitler would loudly call the United States a feeble country while at the same time referring to it as an industrial colossus worthy of imitation. Or he would belittle America in the vilest terms while at the same time looking at the latest photos from the United States, watching American films, and amusing himself with Mickey Mouse cartoons. America was a place that Hitler admiredfor the can-do spirit of the American people, which he attributed to their Nordic bloodand enviedfor its enormous territorial size, abundant resources, and political power. Amerika, however, was to Hitler a mongrel nation, grown too rich too soon and governed by a capitalist elite with strong ties to the Jews.Across the Atlantic, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had his own, far more realistically grounded views of Hitler. Fischer contrasts these with the misconceptions and misunderstandings that caused Hitler, in the end, to see only Amerika, not America, and led to his defeat.
Author: Robert Jarvenpa
Circumpolar Lives and Livelihood is a cross-cultural ethnoarchaeological study of the gendered nature of subsistence in northern hunter-gatherer-fisher societies. Based on field studies of four circumpolar societies, it documents the complexities of womens and mens involvement in food procurement, processing, and storage, and the relationship of such behaviors to the built landscape. Avoiding simplistic stereotypes of male and female roles, the framework of gendered landscapes reveals the variability and flexibility of womens and mens actual lives in a manner useful for archaeological interpretations of hunter-foragers.Innovative in scope and design, this is the first study to employ a controlled, four-way, cross-cultural comparison of gender and subsistence. Members of an international team of anthropologists experienced in northern scholarship apply the same task-differentiation methodology in studies of Chipewyan hunter-fishers of Canada, Khanty hunter-fisher-herders of Western Siberia, Sami intensive reindeer herders of northwestern Finland, and Inupiaq maritime hunters of the Bering Strait of Alaska. This database on gender and subsistence is used to reassess one of the bedrock concepts in anthropology and social science: the sexual division of labor.
Author: Thomas W. Dunlay
Often portrayed by past historians as the greatest guide and Indian fighter in the West, Kit Carson (180968) has become in recent years a historical pariaha brutal murderer who betrayed the Navajos, an unwitting dupe of American expansion, and a racist. Many historians now question both his reputation and his place in the pantheon of American heroes. In Kit Carson and the Indians, TomDunlay urges us to reconsider Carson yet again. To Dunlay, Carson was simply a man of the nineteenth century whose racial views and actions were much like those of his contemporaries.
Author: Marylin A. Katz
Noted for her contradictory words and actions, Penelope has been a problematic character for critics of the Odyssey, many of whom turn to psychological explanations to account for her behavior. In a fresh approach to the problem, Marylin Katz links Penelope closely with the strategies that govern the overall design of the narrative. By examining its apparent inconsistencies and its deferral of truth and closure, she shows how Penelope represents the indeterminacy that is characteristic of the narrative as a whole. Katz argues that the controlling narrative device of the poem is the paradigm of Agamemnon's fateful return from the Trojan War, narrated in the opening lines of the Odyssey. This story operates not only as a point of reference for Odysseus' homecoming but also as an alternative plot, and the danger that Penelope will betray Odysseus as Clytemnestra did Agamemnon is kept alive throughout the first half of the poem. Once Odysseus reaches Ithaca, however, the paradigm of Helen's faithlessness substitutes for that of Clytemnestra. The narrative structure of the Odyssey is thus based upon an intratextual revision of its own paradigm, through which the surface meaning of Penelope's words and actions is undermined though never openly discredited.Originally published in 1991.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.